Sully was a maker of history as well as a writer of history. He had no taste and no time for self-analysis, and, like Joinville, he had the rare good fortune to serve a master whom he sincerely loved and admired. Comines also admired his master, but he did not love him. Nobody has yet been put on record as loving Louis the Eleventh. All these men wrote with candour and acumen. No pleasure which they can have taken in compiling their memoirs can equal, or even approach, the pleasure with which we read them. Their accuracy is the accuracy of the observer, not of the antiquarian. “In my opinion,” writes Comines, “you who lived in the age when these affairs were transacted have no need to be informed of the exact hours when everything was done.” “I now make known to my readers,” observes Joinville composedly, “that all they shall find in this book which I have declared I have seen and known, is true, and what they ought most firmly to believe. As for such things as I have mentioned as hearsay, they may understand them as they please.” These excursions into the diversified region of the memoir lead us away from the straight and narrow path of the autobiography. These saunterings along the pleasant byways of history distract us from the consideration of the human soul, as shown us by its too ecstatic possessor. We know as much as we need to know about the souls of Lord Hervey, and Sully, and of the Sire de Joinville, which was really a beautiful article; but we know a great deal more about the souls of George the Second, and Henry of Navarre, and of Saint Louis, shining starlike through the centuries. What we gain is better worth having than what we lose.